Assassins and Character Assassins

Spielberg's Munich

E. Michael Jones

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend, Indiana 46617

© 2012 Fidelity Press

To my grandchildren

Table of Contents

Preface

Munich

Palestinian Intellectuals

Good Jew, Bad Jew

Tricks Of The Trade

Character Assassination

Biographical Note

Preface

Those who have been pondering the question of whether life imitates art or art imitates life would do well to ponder the trajectory of moral decline which has taken place since the release in early 2006 of Steven Spielberg's movie Munich. One of the scenes in that movie depicts the Mossad hit squad, dispatched to avenge the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, running from room to room in a mayhem-filled apartment in Beirut holding photos of suspects next to the faces of men who were about to be executed for something they may or may not have done in a dimly lit room full of screaming women and children and men dying of gunshot wounds because they resembled someone whom the Mossad had condemned to death.

What Spielberg decried as immoral, racist, Israeli-style "justice" has now become the norm for America, which Spielberg posited as an alternative to the Israeli approach. Well, America is an alternative no more. Beginning with the Bush administration's turn to torture as the solution to terrorism, Americans, including Jewish Americans like Spielberg, have watched in dismay as the rule of law was replaced by the Jewish reading of the lex talionis. And so, to answer our initial question, art found its fulfillment in life when Navy seals broke into a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and murdered someone they claimed to be Osama bin Laden. Whether the man who died was in fact Osama bin Laden is something we'll never know because the body was dumped into the sea, "according to Islamic burial customs." Whether Osama bin Laden was guilty of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center is something else we'll never know because he was never put on trial. In fact no one has ever been put on trial for that attack. As a result, the real perpetrators remain unknown and the nagging questions that have persisted over the past decade remain unanswered.

What perdures in the vacuum created by those unanswered questions is the wreck of the rule of law in America and the ongoing Israelification of our military, which now functions as judge, jury, and executioner in carrying out targeted assassinations by drones and more conventional means throughout the world. Spielberg is no Hitchcock, and Munich lacks the moral depth of Hitchcock's World War II film Lifeboat, but even Spielberg's conflicted account of the bloody sequelae of the Munich massacres is evidence enough to prove that Pogo was right all along: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

E. Michael Jones

November 2012

Munich

We live in a culture which erects monuments to Jewish culture. We also live in a culture which prohibits unauthorized interpretations of Jewish monuments. The Holocaust is the prime Jewish cultural monument of our day. So we have a federally funded Holocaust museum in Washington, but at the same time it is illegal in many countries of the world to question any of the self-contradictory assertions about the Holocaust. Three men were tried in Austria and Germany for what is known in the media as "holocaust denial." Questioning the number of people who died in concentration camps, whether they died in gas chambers or by other means, or whether there was a plan to exterminate Jews, can land you in jail in 13 countries in the world, even though the numbers have already changed a number of times and the term holocaust came from a by now abandoned assertion that the Jews were exterminated in pits of flaming kerosene.

Stephen Spielberg is one of the most important mythmakers of our day. He has provided icons for our culture like ET and Indiana Jones. He has also contributed to the Jewish monument known as the Holocaust. His movie Schindlers List did more to fix the image of the Holocaust in the mind of the average American than the pictures of emaciated concentration camp inmates taken at the end of the war. Then, as if to indicate that nothing stands still in the realms of ideas, Spielberg did a movie which seemed to cast doubt on the moral mandate for Israel which Schindlers List helped create. Spielberg's Munich describes how Avner Kauffman and four Mossad hit men set out to murder the eleven Palestinians involved in the botched kidnapping of Israeli athletes which took place at the Olympic Games in 1972.

But to state the case in that way is to misstate it. Munich is primarily a film about discourse and epistemology, which is to say, it is a film about Avner Kauffman killing nine people whom he assumes were involved in the Munich massacres. As the film proceeds, it becomes clear that he really has no way of knowing if the people he blows up or guns down are guilty because he is simultaneously judge, jury, and executioner, and people with all three of those duties are notoriously lax in fulfilling their responsibilities. Avner Kauffman kills Mr. X because the secular equivalent of the rabbis, in this case the Mossad, tells him that Mr. X is guilty. There was no trial. The guilt of the Palestinians in question is certain because someone in the Mossad said so. Disagreement is not an option. Anyone who disagrees with the rabbi gets expelled from the synagogue. Munich is Jewish discourse with a vengeance — in just about every sense of the word.

Simply by the way it was conceptualized, Munich couldn't be anything but propaganda. The premise of the movienecessitates this. Propaganda begins by deciding what is going to be left out of the film. The film by the fact that it is called Munich gives the impression that the cycle of violence started in 1972 and that the Palestinians started it. Left out of the film is the fact that hundreds of Palestinian civilians had been murdered when Israel jets attacked their refugee camp in February 1972, which is to say seven months before the Olympic attack.

Munich isa movie about the rules of Jewish discourse. It is also a movie about how giving the wrong answer to a Jew will result in your death or the death of your career. The first Palestinian who gets murdered in Munich is Wa'il Zu'aytir, an elderly, scholarly Palestinian living in Rome. Zu'aytir is murdered after giving a lecture at an open-air cafe in impeccable Italian about why he decided to translate 1001 Arabian Nights into that language. Zu'aytir's "trial" consists of the two Israeli assassins questioning the Palestinian with the loaded guns in their shaking hands aimed at his head and vital organs. This lesson in Jewish discourse begins with a question: "Are you Wa'il Zu'aytir?" Before getting a satisfactory answer to that question, the assassins move on to their second question: "Do you know why we are here?" The second question has an eerie existential ring to it, as if the Israeli hit men are asking themselves some vague question about the purpose of their mission and, by extension, their lives as well. Having failed to answer either question in their surprise quiz correctly, the unarmed elderly Palestinian translator gets gunned down in cold blood. The question the murders forgot to ask is "Did you have anything to do with Munich?" Or was that question moot by the time they confronted him with guns drawn? If he had said "no," would they have shot him anyway? Or would this have called for more facial agonizing by the handsome movie star (Eric Bana, who played Hector in Troy) who played Avner Kauffman?

As'ad Abu Khalid, who knew Wa'il Zu'aytir's niece, wrote in a review which appeared on the web at Angry Arab Blog that the man Avner Kauffman and the Jewish toymaker from Belgium gunned down in Rome "knew nothing about Munich." The man who was shot 14 times for not coming up with the right answer to Avner Kauffman's questions. The man the Israelis said was the mastermind behind the Munich plot was, according to Abu Khalid, "an academic with close ties to Leftist circles in Italy" who "almost certainly never held a gun in his life." He "was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on which he knew nothing."

Is Abu Khalid telling us the truth? Or was Avner right in his belief that Zu'aytir was involved with Black September? The answer to this question is that civilized peoples do not conduct inquiries like this with loaded guns aimed at the heads of people expected to answer these questions. In a civilized world, people suspected of murder are apprehended by the police and put on trial. People who think that they have some God-given or racially conferred right to act this way are not part of the civilized community of nations. They are criminals and they should be treated as criminals. At one point this thought even occurs to Avner Kauffman. "Couldn't we just arrest him and put him on trial like Eichmann?" The answer, according to Avner's Mossad handler is "no" because in the meantime more Israelis would die. The moral logic of this response — or the lack thereof — convinces Kauffman that he has to go on killing. We are not dealing here, in other words, with civilized people.

The Israelis whom Spielberg portrays in this movie do not believe in the rule of law. They believe that they have the right to question you at gunpoint, and if you come up with the wrong answer to their questions, they believe that they have the right to kill you. There is no moral complexity here. These people are criminals whose behavior is morally indistinguishable from the local Negroes who gun down the 50-year old Sikh who happens to own a convenience store in their neighborhood, as happened in South Bend, Indiana during the first week in January 2006. Spielberg, however, thinks that Kauffman and his accomplices are different because they are Jews. Jews are allowed to do this sort of thing because of the Holocaust. Spielberg finds the premise of racial morality repugnant coming from the mouth of Jews, but he can't reject it out of hand, as any civilized person would, because he is a Jew. So, the fact that Stephen Spielberg can neither fully accept nor totally reject Jewish racial morality provides the dramatic framework for this film.

Spielberg then moves on to the Israelis' next victim. In dramatizing the second killing, Spielberg goes out of his way to show the lengths to which the Israelis went not to kill the victim's daughter. These are humane killers, Spielberg seems to be telling us. They didn't kill the daughter of Mahmud Hamshari, the PLO representative in France. What Spielberg fails to show is how Hamshari was connected to Munich. The moviegoer takes it on faith because Avner took Hamshari's guilt on faith, faith in the infallible intelligence of his Mossad handlers. Abu Khalid, however, claims that Mahmud Hamshari, the PLO representative in France who died after the bomb which Avner's hit men hid in his phone exploded in his face, like Wa'il Zu'aytir, "had nothing to do with Munich."

Again, when it comes to matters of life and death, civilized people do not behave in this manner. If Hamshari had been brought to trial, he would have had a chance to prove his innocence. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the Israelis would have to prove his guilt. It's nice that the Israelis didn't set off the bomb when Hamshari's 12-year-old daughter picked up the phone, but this doesn't change the fact that what they did was murder and immoral. There is no moral complexity here. The complexity is purely cinematographic — how to make cold-blooded killers seem appealing.

By the time we get to the third killing, a mass murder that left over 100 dead in an Israeli commando raid on Beirut, the Jews shoot first and ask questions later. The agonizing questioning of the first murder has been replaced by Israeli commandos holding up photos in a dimly lit apartment before wasting the guy on the bed, who certainly looked like the guy in the photo, at least in the three seconds they took to make the comparison. They both had mustaches after all. The first woman is allowed to get out of bed before the Israelis gun down her husband. The second one gets gunned down in bed with her husband. According to Abu Khalid, Kamal Udwan, one of the PLO leaders we see getting gunned down, not only "had no responsibilities in Europe" but in fact opposed operations in Europe proposed by Black September.

Palestinian Intellectuals

The premise of the movie, that the Mossad was retaliating against people who had participated in the attack on the Munich Olympic village, is only partly true. Both before and after Munich, the Mossad had no qualms about murdering Palestinian intellectuals and journalists who had nothing to do with guns or terrorist attacks. The poet Kamal Nasir was murdered in his bed for presumably writing the wrong kind of poetry. He had nothing to do with Munich. Avner Kauffman's group of assassins also murdered a Palestinian in 1973 who was sitting next to a swimming pool in Norway with his pregnant wife. The Israelis were acting on mistaken information. The killers were apprehended by Norwegian police but later released in a secret deal with the Israeli government. Spielberg, for some reason, chose to omit this dramatic vignette from his film.

As I said, Munich is Jewish discourse with a vengeance. The fact that the goyim watching this movie were not morally outraged is a tribute to Spielberg's skill as a propagandist and an indication of the extent to which they have internalized the precepts of Jewish discourse. Hollywood was a Jewish operation from its inception, but for years the Jews who ran Hollywood never made films with explicitly Jewish themes. All of this changed in the late '60s. Beginning with the novels of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow's novels, followed by Portnoy's Complaint at the end of the same decade, followed by the movies of Woody Allen during the '70s, Jewish themes and ideas became part of mainstream culture. All of this would have been fine — except for the blasphemy and corruption of morals which invariably accompanied Jewish themes — but at around the same time, the rules of discourse changed as well. At around the same time that moviegoers were lining up to see Annie Hall, Jewish literary critics like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida were changing the rules of discourse. Before they took over the higher levels of literary criticism, discourse in America was run according to Whig/Protestant principles. One of the key principles of American discourse up to the '70s was the secular reading of Luther's doctrine of Sola Scriptura. According to the American reading of this principle, each man was allowed access to texts and given the right to interpret them according to the best of his ability. American discourse based on Sola Scriptura was compatible with democratic ideals. During the years following World War II, when large numbers of Americans went to college for the first time, a literary school known as the New Criticism arose to give the average college student the interpretive skills necessary to read a poem in an intelligent manner.

All of that changed in the '70s when Stanley Fish asserted, first of all, that there was "no text" and, secondly, that interpretations were not something that just anybody could come up with. Interpretations, according to Professor Fish, were the privilege of "interpretive communities," meaning English departments at prestigious institutions like Johns Hopkins University, where he happened to teach. Before long, any institution became ipso facto prestigious by the fact that it had hired Stanley Fish. First Duke and then the University of Illinois at Chicago became prestigious. At the same time Jacques Derrida at Yale was saying that the interpretation of texts was so difficult, that no one could do it. Readings were no longer possible; all that was possible were "misreadings." Discourse had become Jewish, which is to say, those who wanted to be heard and taken seriously had to follow the new rules.

Needless to say, neither of these essentially Talmudic forms of literary criticism were compatible with American democratic ideals. According to Stanley Fish, the Torah, which is to say, the poem or "text" as a secular surrogate for the Bible, had been swallowed up by the Talmud of arcane literary theory, for which — and this will come as no surprise — he was the chief rabbi. Now the democratic masses no longer had the right to their own interpretation of texts. Interpretation was something that only the rabbis were qualified to do, and — this followed necessarily from the new rules of Talmudic discourse — anyone who disagreed with the rabbi was expelled from the synagogue. Jews of an earlier era, like Leslie Fiedler, were free to come up with outrageously irreverent and literarily blasphemous assertions like the claim that Huckleberry Finn and Jim were homosexuals, as he did in "Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck Honey," but the days when anyone was free to make any interpretation, as long as it was based on evidence from the text, were numbered.

Stanley Fish set the tone for the new rules of Jewish discourse which replaced the old Protestant rules of discourse in his article "Why there is no such thing as free speech." The rising generation of Jewish intellectuals had used the essentially Protestant notion of free speech to undermine morals and literary standards — just as they would plead for tolerance whenever they lacked political power — but free speech was never really a Jewish idea, and that became apparent when the Jews gained an upper hand in literary criticism, which sets the rules for discourse in our culture. Once literary rabbis like Fish and Derrida controlled discourse in literary criticism, their rules became the rules for academe. The name of the new rules was "political correctness." Political correctness was just another way of saying that the rabbis now controlled discourse and that anyone who had the effrontery to challenge the rabbis' hegemony over discourse would be expelled from the synagogue.

Professors who were raised to think that they had a right to "academic freedom" were the first to learn about the new rules of discourse, but soon the lessons they learned were being taught outside of academe as well. Major league pitchers like John Rocker may have been earning lots of money, but that money could not buy them the freedom to speak their minds. That freedom simply did not exist anymore. The right to express opinions about any text of significance was jealously controlled by the new rabbis. Sola Scriptura was a thing of the past; Torah had disappeared into Talmud. Everything was Talmud now, and the rabbis controlled its dissemination.

So, 40 years after the collapse of the Production Code in Hollywood and 37 years after the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, and 30 years after the publication of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and the premier of Annie Hall, anyone who aspired to say something in public had to take account of the new rules of discourse or run the risk of being punished. Cultural commentary became as a result a dangerous business, not least because the monuments to Jewish culture became all but ubiquitous. It is difficult if not impossible to comment on mainstream culture without touching on some Jewish monument, yet talking about those monuments in the wrong way is now fraught with danger. At the same time that the number of Jewish themes is increasing, the number of permissible interpretations of those themes is narrowing dramatically. We have reached an intolerable situation. Mass culture shoves one artifact after another under our noses, but open discourse about those artifacts is prohibited. In this regard, Munich is more than just a jet set thriller about terrorism. It is an allegory about discourse according to Jewish rules. The Jew puts a gun to your head, and if you give the wrong answer to his question, he kills you. Munich describes a more dramatic form of political correctness, set in a world in which being Jewish absolves you from the canons of civilized behavior.

As a result of all this, any reviewer of a film like Stephen Spielberg's Munich is in a bind: If the reviewer says that Golda Meir is a cold-blooded killer who has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, he runs the danger of being called an anti-Semite. But this is precisely how Stephen Spielberg portrays her in his movie, even if at the same time he tries to make Meir look as grandmotherly and sympathetic as possible. At this point we reach the conflict that is gnawing away at Stephen Spielberg. There is a radical incoherence to this movie. Munich is a Jewish propaganda film but one with a bad conscience and Stephen Spielberg lacks the moral firepower to resolve his own dilemma. Propaganda films always rely on manipulation of imagery. To get their point across, propaganda films manipulate their audiences. Emotion short circuits reason to achieve the desired political effect. In Munich, we are treated to the spectacle of Stephen Spielberg manipulating himself. Spielberg is trying to resolve his own moral misgivings by making the Jews look as good as possible. Even Golda Meir, who had a face that could stop a clock, looks good in this movie.

But the bigger question is: why does Spielberg want her to look good? If she did what he says she did, then she is a brutal criminal, even more brutal than the handsome Avner Kauffman, who is morally corrupted by agreeing to go along with Meir's version of Murder, Inc. If Golda Meir did what Spielberg says she did, nothing can make her look good. Spielberg first accuses her, and by extension the Israelis she represents as their head of state, of criminal behavior and then tries to exonerate her by good lighting, makeup, and good lines. There is something radically incoherent going on here, and it is traceable in large measure to Spielberg's defective moral vision, which is what led him to make this propaganda film with a conscience in the first place.

Once Golda Meir commissions Avner Kauffman to kill the Palestinians responsible for the Olympic Massacre in Munich in 1972, the scene switches almost immediately to one showing photos of the suspects, except that "suspects" is a legal term for people who are apprehended and must stand trial. The Palestinians whose pictures get tossed around the table at Mossad headquarters are guilty according to the parameters of the movie. It's a cinematographic convention: like putting Negroes in front of computers to make them look intelligent. Once the pictures of the Palestinians land on the desk of the Mossad agent in charge of the case, the viewer is by that fact convinced that the people who were pictured were in fact guilty. Spielberg leads us on in this direction, making what As'ad Abu Khalil said "could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads," but then he pulls back and starts to agonize over his own propaganda.

Good Jew, Bad Jew

One of the purposes of this movie is to distinguish the good Jew from the bad Jew. Spielberg struggles with his own conscience and his knowledge that he is a Jew and, as such, a member of the group which has perpetrated and justified the perpetration of countless criminal acts, in the end creating a spiral of violence that is out of control in the Middle East and the greatest threat to world peace in the 21st century. Confronted by the post-post Auschwitz realization that Jews in fact do do bad things to other people, Spielberg tries to resolve a moral dilemma with powerful acting and clever, if sometimes sentimental, cinematography. By the end of the movie Stephen Spielberg has reached his final answer to the moral question he proposed at the beginning of Munich. According to Spielberg's moral theology, a good Jew feels remorse after he guns you down in cold blood, but a bad Jew doesn't.

The film inspired feelings of nostalgia. I had a front row seat when this drama played itself out on the European stage. Three years before I was a graduate student listening to Stanley Fish explain how there was "no text" and that all interpretations came from "interpretive communities" of literary critical rabbis, I was in Germany teaching English. In my spare time, I could watch Germans my age, who were invariably still at the university, roll a cigarette and spout off something they had read in Marcuse somewhere, just as Avner Kauffman did at the beginning of Munich. As in the movie, there was invariably American music playing in the background in these smoke-filled rooms. When Avner was hunting down Palestinians, I lived with Palestinians in Berlin, who denounced me as a Zionist stooge in rants that often lasted as a long as the German discussions of Marcuse. I met a Saudi Prince on the Ku'damm at a Greek pizzeria at two in the morning. He kissed me on both cheeks and offered me a job teaching English in Saudi Arabia. If he had been on Avner Kauffman's hit list, I probably would not be writing this essay today because the Mossad has a way of taking out innocent bystanders when they take out their enemies.

Europe was wracked with terrorism at the time. America was then a place where that sort of thing did not happen. Munich is a movie that in many ways explains why that situation is now reversed. In an attack on Spielberg and his movie which appeared in the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier described Munich as "a parable of American policy since September 11." If Wieseltier is implying that America has adopted the Mossad's methods in dealing with Arabs, he is essentially correct — as the furor over Abu Ghraib, the debate on torture, and the European unhappiness with the CIA kidnapping of their citizens has shown. But things were not always that way. There was a time when the CIA was different from the Mossad. There was a time when they were often at odds.

As some indication of how much things have changed since then, the CIA shows up for a brief cameo appearance in Munich — not to assist but to thwart Avner and the Mossad from killing one of the Palestinians on their hit list. The fact that the CIA agents come across as the only morally sympathetic characters in this movie is some indication of the moral morass into which America has sunk since 9/11. Just as Avner and his Mossad thugs are about to murder another Palestinian, an American CIA agent, feigning drunkenness, accosts Avner as one of his long-lost friends. A fistfight ensues. By the time everyone calms down, the Palestinian is safely in his hotel, and the Americans have thwarted a murder in what was once considered a typically American way, which is to say with panache and bravado but without the use of deadly force. As the CIA agents drive away, they roll down their windows and give the Israelis the finger. Seeing the CIA give the Mossad the finger made me like Stephen Spielberg, who for a moment reminded me of the Jews I knew 30 years ago.

For a moment I remembered the way America was in 1973, then I was saddened by how much has been lost since the Neoconservatives commandeered American foreign policy and put it in the service of Israel. Since Stephen Spielberg created and filmed this vignette, it is safe to assume that he shares the same feelings. Now American CIA operatives routinely engage in kidnappings and torture, and, as anyone involved in this sort of behavior invariably does, they often kidnap and torture the wrong guy. America is not alone in this descent into moral barbarism. English policemen, who in 1973 didn't carry guns, gunned down an innocent Brazilian in a London subway because he looked like an Arab.

Spielberg is not alone in complaining about the amorality of global politics. Lest anyone wax too sentimental about the CIA, I recommend Syriana, another top ten film for 2005, starring George Clooney. Spielberg, however, does what Clooney dared not do in Syriana. He traces the recent descent into barbarism back to the Jews, and as an American Jew he points the finger at the Israelis as the culprits. It is, therefore not surprising that Ehud Danoch, the Israeli consul general for the United States, denounced the film even though Spielberg, as director of Schindler's List, was one of the best propagandists Israel ever had. Danoch criticized Spielberg for claiming that Mossad agents and the PLO's Black September use the same methods. This, Danoch sniffed "is an incorrect moral equation. We in Israel know this. There is also a certain pretentiousness in attempting to treat a painful, decades-long conflict by means of quite superficial statements in a two and a half hour movie." Danoch, however, never complained when Spielberg treated Auschwitz "in a two and a half hour movie."

"Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," Golda Meir grimly concludes early in the film. The Jews I worked for in the '70s used to describe Golda Meir as Lyndon Johnson in drag. Spielberg has made her prettier on the screen than she was in real life, but his film gives expression to a tension between American Jews and Israel which has never disappeared. By the end of the film, Avner Kauffman leaves Israel and seeks refuge in America, at the very moment of course when America was driving politicians who were suspicious of Jewish influence — Richard Nixon comes to mind — from office. Anyone who returned to America from Europe in the '70s relaxed imperceptibly when he walked through customs. Customs officials carried Uzis over there but not over here. Avner's refuge from Israel ceased being a refuge on September 11, 2001, and Spielberg, a Jew who has done well for himself in America, is upset by that fact. As a powerful Jew, Spielberg can say things on the big screen that the lowly goyim would do well not even to think.

One of those forbidden thoughts is that the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog. No one ever claimed, at least not in Culture Wars, the magazine I edit, that Hollywood Jews and Neoconservative Jews from New York were one and the same group. Hollywood Jews supported Bill Clinton; the Neocon Jews supported George Bush. Now the biggest Jew in Hollywood has decided to take the gloves off and tell us what he thinks about the neocons and the Israelis who have benefited from the neocon takeover of American foreign policy. We have long maintained that any goy who says what a powerful Jew like Stephen Spielberg says in a major Hollywood film will be punished for his effrontery.

Tricks Of The Trade

Munich is so wicked according to the canons of public discourse, that even Stephen Spielberg will not go unpunished for his impiety.

Writing in the New Republic, the magazine which has provided a forum for Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's attacks on Pope Pius XII, Leon Wieseltier led off the attack when he accused Spielberg of committing the "sin of moral equivalence." Munich, he opined, "is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israelis make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents."

First of all, as anyone who has seen the film can testify, this is simply not true. Munich uses all the tricks of the filmmaker's trade to dispose the audience to sympathy toward Avner Kauffman and toward his cause. But whatever Spielberg does is not enough because no one, not even a powerful Hollywood Jew like Stephen Spielberg, can placate the Goldhagen wing of the Jewish race without descending into justifications that are odious and morally indefensible. That in many ways is the point of this movie.

I'm talking here about race as the ultimate Jewish morality, a theme which Spielberg touches on explicitly in Munich. When the blond-haired, blue-eyed Shaygets-looking Jewish hit man with the English accent is confronted by the spectre of moral squeamishness in the face of so much bloodshed, he plays the Jewish racial card. In a heated exchange with his blood-bespattered colleagues, he claims that he doesn't care whether they murder innocent civilians (assuming of course that the people they target are actually guilty) because the "only blood that matters is Jewish blood." When another hit man disagrees, the Shaygets tells his colleagues to take down the man's pants to see if he's circumcised. In other words, the only real Jew is one who is willing to commit murder in the service of Jewish blood. The perceptive moviegoer may notice similarities between that idea and Nazism, but the rules of discourse prohibit goyim from mentioning this.

Spielberg, however, is aware of this pernicious dialectic. Munich is in many ways Spielberg's protest against the violent dialectic of Jewish racial morality, but he gets caught up in it nonetheless. The neocons made sure of that. Leon Wieseltier's comments were part of a preemptive neocon propaganda barrage against Spielberg and Munich, which began more than two weeks before the film arrived in theaters. "There's been a huge push from the people who have that kind of neocon attitude about it to make sure that it doesn't get grounding, to try to keep it from getting its footing," said David Poland, editor of Movie City News, an online magazine about the film industry. "There is a public push to hurt the movie before it even gets seen." Wieseltier's article was followed by an article in the New York Times by the ineffable panjandrum of neo-conservatism, David Brooks, who joined colleagues Wieseltier and Danoch in demanding that someone take Stephen Spielberg's pants down so that they can see whether he's circumcised or not.

As part of his attack on Spielberg, which was necessarily a defense of Israel, Brooks claimed that the Israelis no longer, do assassinations. "In 1972," according to Brooks, "Israel was just entering the era of spectacular terror attacks and didn't know how to respond. But over the years Israelis have learned that targeted assassinations, which are the main subject of this movie, are one of the less effective ways to fight terror." Israel, he continued, "much prefers to arrest suspected terrorists. Arrests don't set off rounds of retaliation, and arrested suspects are likely to provide you with intelligence, the real key to defanging terror groups."

This brought an instant rebuttal from an Israeli writing in Tikkun Olan, who reminded Brooks that Israel killed the last man on the Black September list in Paris in 1992 and that they had murdered Hamas leader Sheik Yassin in March 2004. "Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong," huffed Brooks, who is presumably an expert on reality. "In Spielberg's Middle East," he continued, "the only way to achieve peace is by renouncing violence. But in the real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by compromise between the reasonable elements on each side." That, of course, is precisely what has been happening in the Middle East for almost six decades now. Brooks failed to see that in this regard Spielberg is several steps ahead of him.

The neocon attack on Spielberg for making Munich made clear that any Jew who takes a stand on moral issues, no matter how conflicted, above the level of "four legs good, two legs bad" will have his circumcision called into question and get denounced as a self-hating Jew who is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

One Jew whose circumcision was not called into question was Michelle Goldberg, who wrote about the neocon attack on Spielberg in Salon magazine. For Michelle Goldberg Munich is about morality: "Munich is about the way vengeance and violence — even necessary, justified violence — corrupt both their victims and their perpetrators. It's about the struggle to maintain some bedrock morality while engaging in immorality." In stating Spielberg's case that way, Goldberg gets to the heart of his dilemma and the heart of "Jewish" morality as well. In any nonracial moral theology, a man is bad if he does bad things. According to the tenets of Jewish racial morality, a Jew is moral even if he commits immoral actions, as long as those actions benefit the Jewish race. Spielberg both accepts and rejects that moral worldview. The blonde, blue-eyed Jew (do we have a sly reference to the Jew as Nazi here?) who articulates the view is shown as repugnant, so the best way out of the dilemma in the film is to have Avner Kauffman act on the same principle but feel bad about it afterward. Golda Meir then carries this line of thinking to its logical conclusion by claiming that moral compromise is part of "civilization," when in fact the opposite is true.

Moral reasoning, as anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan knows, was never Spielberg's strong suit. People in Spielberg movies tend to get killed because they belong to the wrong group, i.e., Germans in Saving Private Ryan or Palestinians in Munich. They often get killed with their hands in the air. The idea that it is never permissible to shoot a man who is standing in front of you with his hands up in the air, even if he is a German or a Palestinian, never seems to register on Spielberg's moral radar screen. Instead, morality is always a function of the group you belong to. So Spielberg inexorably gets swept up into believing that a Jew is justified in killing innocent people from a group which is perceived as threatening the future existence of either the Jewish people or the state of Israel, but once he states the idea explicitly he spends the rest of the movie telling us this can't be true. That is, in a nutshell, the plot of Munich. The Jew Spielberg is appalled at what Jews believe. A Jew is someone who believes that hate is a virtue. A Jew feels that he can kill you in cold blood if you pose a threat to the Jewish race or the state of Israel.

This can't be right, Spielberg tells us in Munich. It can't be true that Jews can just murder anyone who is identified by the Mossad as a threat to Israel, but if that is not true, why does he try to make Golda Meir and the killers she commissioned look good? Well, Spielberg can't answer that question, nor can he come up with a clear formulation of the moral issue at stake here, which is that it is never justifiable to take the life of an innocent human being. If, in time of war, an enemy combatant throws down his gun and puts up his hands in surrender, you may not kill him. If you do, it is murder. You may not kill an unarmed man simply because you suspect him of a crime, not even if your superiors tell you to do so. Superiors who choose power over the law destroy civilization in the process of destroying human life. Spielberg knows that murder is wrong because, as a human being, he cannot not know this. God has engraved the moral law on his heart. There is no such thing as invincible ignorance in moral matters, and yet … . The moral law which has been written on Stephen Spielberg's heart by God has been overwritten so many times by distorted versions of Jewish ideology that he just doesn't know anymore, and so his movies are cloudy with moral ambiguity, which he tries to disguise with clever cinematography.

Or references to family. In Munich, morality is invariably associated with the family, which is to say, the social unit one step below the tribe or state but one step above the individual. It's as if Spielberg wants to choose something like a quantitative version of the Golden Mean as a way out of his dilemma. Morality is associated first with Avner Kauffman's family, in particular his newborn daughter. Morality is another way of saying it's okay to kill other people so that his daughter can live. In trying to make moral sense of what he is doing, Avner gets no help from his mother, who is a completely amoral racist. Whatever it takes to preserve the Tribe is okay by Mrs. Kauffman. It's okay to kill goyim as Avner does it to make the world safer for your mother and daughter. Avner is confirmed in his views in this regard when he meets the family of his French informant, who, judging from the way they bless themselves at the table, are either Serb or Russian Orthodox. Family comes first. Family justifies immoral behavior.

At this point we begin to wonder whether Stephen Spielberg, who dumped his Jewish wife to marry a shiksa, isn't engaging in protracted plea bargaining with his own conscience. As I said before, when Spielberg is really stumped on a moral issue, he combines clever cinematography with pictures of family life, as if by having recourse to clever film propaganda, he can manipulate his own conscience. In one of the most bathetic scenes in the movie, Avner has visions of the kidnapping going bad on the tarmac in Munich while having sex with his wife. The implication is, of course, that one has something to do with the other, as in "I am justified in killing innocent (or not, who knows?) Palestinians because if I don't I won't be able to father any more children." Whatever moral qualms we may feel are all supposed to be resolved by the frame at the end of the scene in which we see the hands of husband and wife, with their respective wedding rings, in post-coital repose.

Trying to resolve our doubts this way is manipulative enough, but at a certain point we get the sense that Spielberg is trying to use clever cinematography to resolve his own doubts as well. Let's resolve this issue right now: family is not a justification for murder any more than state or race are justifications for murder. The prince can wield the sword; the state can take human life; soldiers can kill other soldiers in combat, but no one, including the state, may commit murder. If Jews took cognizance of the Catholic just war principles, they would spare themselves much agonizing. But if Jews accepted Catholic principles they would no longer be Jews.

Ultimately, all of the agonizing in the film is not over morals, or over the immorality of rogue government agencies killing innocent people, but rather over the Jews' image of themselves. The first member of the hit squad to crack under the pressure which the guilty conscience exerts is the toy maker turned bomb maker from Belgium. "Jews," he tells Avner, "don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. … We're supposed to be righteous." At a certain point in this film it becomes difficult to tell whether Spielberg is upset at the Israelis for the never ending cycle of killing and retaliation they have imposed on the world or because the Israelis, as a result of this mayhem, are guilty of destroying the Jews' most precious possession, their image of themselves as righteous nice guys.

In seeking to answer this question, we come back to the earlier question of what is a Jew. The question of who is a Jew is related to the bigger question of "we" and "them." Spiegel is no Hitchcock, who in Lifeboat made it clear that "we" couldn't act like "them," them at the time being the Nazis. This is, of course, precisely what has happened — both in America and in Israel. We have become them. The CIA no longer gives the Mossad the finger. The CIA has become an adjunct of the Mossad and has taken over their methods. Germany is rife with stories of CIA agents kidnapping German citizens with Arab names and transporting them to secret bases where they are tortured. One of the most celebrated cases, the one that caused the most agonizing in Germany, was a case of mistaken identity. The moral corruption of the nation of Puritan Judaizers who refer to themselves ad nauseam as the "city on a hill" followed, Spielberg seems to be saying, from the moral corruption of the state of Israel, the model for Puritan America in the first place. But, from the Jewish perspective, something even worse has happened. Munich has put an end to the myth of the Jew as victim. In fact, in Munich Stephen Spielberg has put an end to the myth he helped create when he did Schindler's List. According to Michelle Goldberg, Spielberg's Munich is an elaboration on the line by Golda Meir, "We can never forgive them for making us kill their children." Munich reminds the Jews that "In certain circles, apparently, simply calling attention to the fact that the people killed by counter terrorists are, in fact, people, is at best maudlin, at worst disloyal." Another Jew concurs: "It's very disturbing. Something bad has happened. It's almost as though Spielberg's warning about the corrosive effect on the soul is all too true."

Character Assassination

So what is a Jew to do?

First of all, the Jews should take what Stephen Spielberg has to say to heart and stop asking him to take his pants down and prove that he's circumcised. If the only real Jew is the Jew who is willing to commit murder for his race, then we are dealing with a nation of criminals, all of whom should be put behind bars. Spielberg can't resolve the Jewish moral dilemma because there is no possible way to square that circle and reconcile Jewish racial morality with real morality, but he shouldn't be punished by the Jewish Nazis for raising the issue and giving expression to his moral doubts.

Secondly, Jews should get out of the assassination business. I'm talking here not just about Israeli hit men murdering Palestinians. I'm talking about the more widespread Jewish involvement in character assassination, not unrelated to the spread of political correctness, which has been the modus operandi of Jewish organizations in America for decades now. I am referring specifically to the character assassination of Catholics and conservatives which occurs whenever they incur the wrath of powerful Jews. The case of Father Charles Coughlin springs immediately to mind. He gave a speech following the attack on German Jews now known as Kristallnacht, in which he deplored the violence against the Jews but added that if Catholics were going to be held responsible for Nazism, then Jews should accept responsibility for Bolshevism. He continues to be defamed for that speech. Charles Lindbergh met a similar fate when he gave a speech in Iowa in which he claimed that the Jews and the British wanted to drag America into war. The fact that what he said was true was irrelevant. Lindbergh was punished for telling a truth which the Jews found offensive, and he would serve as a paradigm for future punishments, which increased in America in direct proportion to Jewish political power. The defamation campaign which people like Daniel Goldhagen with support from Jewish institutions has been waging against Pope Pius XII is a more recent example of the same thing. The difference between the assassinations performed by Israeli hit squads and the character assassinations Jews perform on public figures they don't like is that the hit squad assassinations end with the death of the victim. Character assassination, on the other hand, goes on forever, or as long as Jews write books. The character assassination of Lindbergh was resurrected by Philip Roth in his novel, The Plot Against America.

We live in a world where Jews are rewarded for telling lies and Catholics are punished for telling the truth. Normally, you will never see a Jew attack a Catholic. Instead of Mossad agents, the Jews hire Catholics to assassinate the character of other Catholics. The classic example of this was William Buckley at National Review. In his book Up from Liberalism, Buckley recounted how he consulted the ADL whenever charges of anti-Semitism were leveled against the conservatives he was supposed to keep in line. If the ADL had no objections, Buckley's potential victim got off unscathed. If the ADL, however, did have objections, Buckley was their henchman in carrying out the character assassination. Buckley got Sam Francis removed from his job as columnist for the Washington Times, and he did it, according to the late Sam Francis, at the behest of a memo from the ADL. Perhaps Stephen Spielberg will consider doing a future biopic on William F. Buckley, as the goyische Avner Kauffman. Unlike Avner Kauffman, who only assassinated strangers, Buckley was willing to engage in the character assassination of friends and colleagues. His piece in National Review accusing fellow conservatives Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran of anti-Semitism springs immediately to mind. I can already, see in my mind's eye the scene in the yet-to-be-made Spielberg movie when Bill Buckley, played by Brad Pitt, wipes a tear from his cheek as the literary knife goes into Joe Sobran's back.

Buckley's hagiographers like to praise him for what they call "policing the fringes" of the conservative movement. What this comes down to in plain English is character assassination. The tradition continues at NRonline and all of the blog sites they promote. Dale Vree, editor of New Oxford Review, an organ of competing Catholic conservatism, was a prominent target. Leading the pack was Mark Shea, a man who served as one of the Catholic acolytes in the neocon-orchestrated propaganda campaign leading up to the Iraqi war. Shea got phone calls from prominent White House officials who told him how concerned he would be if he could see the evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which was crossing their desks. Shea signed on without seeing the evidence and later felt that he had been lied to, but that didn't cause him to rethink his job as propagandist and character assassin. Robert Sungenis felt his ire before Dale Vree. In a blog entry entitled "NOR Continues Death Spiral into Crankhood," Shea accused Vree of promoting geocentricism because Robert Sungenis allegedly promoted that idea in an article which Vree never published. The Sungenis article which Vree did publish had nothing to do with that topic.

All of this would be puzzling at best until we read an article Vree published in December 2005, exposing Jewish money behind Catholic Neoconservative magazines, and suddenly the picture of what is really going on becomes clearer. In an article entitled, "What is a Neoconservative & Does it Matter?" Vree wrote that around 15 years before, the New Oxford Review

was contacted by a neocon foundation — right out of the blue. The foundation wanted to give us money — "free" money. A fellow flew out from the East Coast and asked me (the Editor) to meet him for drinks in a San Francisco restaurant — on him. Sure! (We were desperate for money.) He told me he would fund us regularly — if we would support corporate capitalism and if we would support a militaristic U.S. foreign policy. What I didn't say was that the fellow was a Jewish neocon with no interest in Christianity or Catholicism, and I suspected he was interested in getting us to promote Jewish neocon interests.

When Vree turned the Jewish donor down, neocon money flowed to other Catholic organs willing to do their bidding. Neocon money went to Crisis, and First Things was launched a few years later with "huge financial support from neocon foundations." As a result, "the neocons found a way to get Catholic and Christian magazines to front for their largely Jewish neocon interests … both Crisis and First Things supported it. A clear case of supporting Jewish neocon interests over Catholic Just War doctrine."

Mark Shea, along with his virtual colleagues Rod Dreher, Sandra Miesel, Bill Cork, et al. have turned Catholic journalism into a synonym for character assassination. In doing this they are only following the lead of their master, the man who founded National Review as a way of "policing the fringes" in the interests of the men behind the scenes. As Margaret Jacob, said of Rousset de Missy, another agent of influence, "If he wasn't paid for his services, he should have been."

As you read this e-book, some apparatchik at the ADL, whose grandfather worked for Lazar Kaganovich or his political party in America, or whose father ate lunch at Alcove #2 in the cafeteria of the City University of New York, is reading along with you. Like the drones at the NKVD who would pore over issues of Popular Mechanics and then put them in safes when they were done, our readers at the ADL are compiling a file on me and everyone else who writes at Culture Wars so that they can pass it on to some Catholic Quisling who will use it as part of his arsenal of character assassination the next time I am asked to give a speech somewhere.

I grew up in an America which believed that this sort of thing only happened in Communist countries. Now the offspring of the Communists have made it the norm in this country. So if Stephen Spielberg can say that he is fed up with Israeli assassination teams, then this goy has the temerity to say, even though he will be punished for saying it, that he is fed up with Jewish character assassination teams as well. When Avner Kauffman got fed up with carrying out Israel's murderous assassination policies, he fled to America. I am fed up with the ADL's murderous character assassination policies. But where can I go, Mr. Spielberg? In fact, where would Avner Kauffman go now? When Stephen Spielberg does a film like Munich, you know it's time for the Jews to get out of the assassination business, both political and character. The goyim should be grateful for this movie. Their deliverance is at hand.

Biographical Note

E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of many books, some of which are available for Kindle, including:

Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

Benedict's Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome

Escape From Globalism: Meditations While Rowing Down the Danube

Jewish Nazis

L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance

The Logos of Architecture and Its Opponents

Niggas in Denial: Pimping the System and The System of Pimping

Requiem for a Whale Rider

Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity